The most captivating fall nonfiction books act as time capsules to indelible cultural moments, from a landmark American sexual discrimination suit to the extraordinary true story of a French literary hero.

There’s nothing like an election to remind us how the fight for gender parity continues, but **Lynn Povich’**s The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace (PublicAffairs) reminds us how far we’ve come. Up to the early seventies, Newsweek resembled the set of Mad Men: Women had dead-end jobs as secretaries and researchers, compiling information folders for the male writers and their editors, who sat in windowed offices. In 1970, a group of women decided to act, launching a five-year legal battle that resulted in Povich herself becoming the magazine’s first female senior editor in 1975. (Meanwhile, four decades later, female journalists continue the struggle to close gaps in pay and number of bylines.)

Sometimes, our foundational battlegrounds can be found beneath our feet—literally. **Robert Sullivan’**s swashbuckling latest begins atop the Empire State Building, where the author sees a “palimpsest of the Revolution, a painted-over canvas of ancient routes walked smooth . . . ”. In My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the relentlessly intrepid Sullivan—a keen chronicler of misunderstood American topographies, from Walden Pond to the Meadowlands, as well as a Vogue Contributing Editor—takes readers on a captivatingly discursive historical treasure hunt through New York and New Jersey, colonial map in hand.

With **Walter Salles’**s film adaptation of On the Road due to hit theaters in December, the timing couldn’t be better for a reevaluation of the Beat Generation icon and the cultural sea change he personified. **Joyce Johnson’**s The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (Viking) debunks the creation myth of On the Road—that it was written in three weeks, on an enormous scroll with no revisions—revealing instead the years of hard labor and false starts that preceded the outlaw classic, including an unpublished French language novella that seemed to presage some of its themes and characters. Johnson, an award-winning memoirist in her own right, draws from her relationship with Kerouac, as well as Kerouac’s private papers, for an unromanticized (but deeply personal) take on a man whose conflicted, roving essence continues to resonate.

One of the more astonishing literary detective stories in recent memory, **Tom Reiss’**s The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown), traces the little-known story of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of writer Alexandre Dumas, who grew up listening to his mother’s stories of his father’s exploits. The biracial Dumas père, born in what is now Haiti to a slave mother and a French nobleman, had the good fortune to come of age during the French Revolution and begin his career amid a fleeting egalitarian moment. Thanks to his military skill, Dumas quickly rose through the ranks to become the first black general in the French Army, powerful enough to threaten Napoleon himself—and incandescent enough to inspire his son’s rapier-witted tales of musketeers and dungeons.